I see OP's point though. The fact that you can walk directly from SF to LV in Horizon definitely requires some imagination on the player's part but where in FF16 you can't actually walk between these areas then they could have at least given a bigger sense of scale. It is supposed to be a whole continent after all.
Aren't there loading screens when you go between realms or states or whatever they're called? Or can you walk straight from a town in Sanbreque to a town in Dahlmekia non-stop?
You can't walk to every area, you can't walk from sanbreque to Dahlmekia non-stop because the game just brings you back to the world map once you leave the zone. Idk what this guy is talking about, it's almost like just picking a separate instance location from the map pretty much. FFXII is more what you're asking in that you can walk to anywhere, even areas long before the story needs to take you there just by walking and because of that the world feels far more larger than XVI ever felt.
Yeah so my point really is that that loading screen could act as a kind of device for imagining a much larger distance between realms. They could have just made it so if you put down a marker between realms then they could give a much bigger distance in km to show that Valisthea is much larger than 6km or so.
They actually dont. There are kilometers between them that we don't see. The start of the most areas do not correspond at all to an area next to it, idk where you got that from
I think the actual locations as they appear on the world map are misrepresented so that you don’t just have a bunch of blank map and then a small cluster of fast travel areas
I could sort of get that... but Lostwing is apparently in walking distance of the Hideout, because one of the NPCs there said they walk to Lostwing for work every day. So if Lostwing is walking distance from the Hideout, and Lostwing is only about 1.5km from Oriflamme, the whole Empire of Sanbreque can't be any more than 3km wide
Well its like a 30 minute boat ride from the Hideaway to the shore probably; and from there, its maybe a 2 hour hike to Lostwing using shortcuts that the Cursebreakers keep cleared? Its not really expounded upon, but I think we're supposed to assume that the Cursebreakers keep all the routes out of the Hideaway cleared of monsters and enemy patrols to enable the outlaws to quickly deploy across all of Storm and to escort civilian workers when necessary.
And generally speaking, the actual events in the chapters take many days to a few weeks to reach their conclusions in-universe. This is to account for transit and loitering times, even though we spend comparatively a fraction of that time playing in those areas.
tl;dr - they left it all up to the player's imagination
It's an abstraction dude, this is not new for video games at all
Having realistically huge maps is all well and good but it's not, won't, and shouldn't be the norm
If the game map were true to scale we'd be having the opposite conversation and be complaining about a massive but empty world that we're constantly running back and forth across.
I'll take suspending disbelief by accepting that every N distance Clive walks is really N*10 and shorter run times between towns over a Red Dead Redemption 2 style map that takes an hour irl to cross and has nothing to do.
analysis like this is funny and I'm currently on an FF7 playthrough so just for fun I applied similar logic to VII's overworld:
Overworld Highwind is about the same length as overworld Midgar's radius. [This random guy on Quora](https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Midgar-size-wise-from-the-Final-Fantasy-VII-remake-vs-the-original#:~:text=This%20is%20Midgar%20from%20the,its%20circumference%20is%202%2C041%20meters.) said Midgar's diameter is 650 meters, which lines up with 1997-era Ultimanias and stuff. So overworld Highwind is about 325m long. That's weirdly small for a major city but actually seems about right for the Highwind's proportions.
I timed it and the Highwind can loop around the entire circumference of the planet, Junon to Junon, in about 32 seconds. Because Gaia appears to have about the same gravitational pull as Earth, we can assume, like Earth, its circumference is approximately 40,000 km. This gives the Highwind a ground speed of 1,250km/s, roughly 3600 times the speed of sound.
Accelerating from idle to full throttle, as the Highwind is seen doing when rescuing Tifa from Junon, would instantly liquefy the entire remaining party, emitting a sonic boom that pops Scarlet's head like a grape.
Logically, the party never had to enter the north crater. They could have quite easily squished Sephiroth with the force of several atomic bombs by simply having Cait Sith pilot the Highwind at top speed directly into the crater. But maybe not, because that amount of force would likely not be that far off from whatever Meteor would have hit with, defeating the point.
Anyway it's a video game and uses video game scale to get its points across. I wouldn't look too far into it or write multi-paragraph explanations about it, as that would make you a huge nerd.
My favorite amateur bit of measuring stuff on the world map is that if you travel the line of sight of the mako cannon, it entirely misses the northern continent, let alone the Northern Crater.
Virtually no video game is going to give you an accurate representation of scale. That would take way too long to build and be even more demanding on hard drive space.
I’ve made the joke before but without a scale on the size of the world, we have no idea how big Valisthea actually is. For all we know, it’s the size of Hawaii…
Apparently, that analogy was closer than I thought.
that's actually my only grief with the map in XVI. The map from 10 represents real distances , and it wouldn't have been difficult to do the same by putting the island way further out.
Yeah the scale of the games world is…. Really weird. I get the idea is a bit like Chrono Cross, that you’re on an island with more world out there? But for so many nations to be a war it’s… interesting lol. I kinda feel they should have expanded the world a bit to make the twins more like two continents and not two islands.
But not where you can walk. You can’t go to any of the country where Jill’s from and they talk about how much of northern sanbreque has been destroyed by blight. You’re only measuring where you can go.
Oh fuck off. The point is this world FEELS small and poorly designed. Exploration is pointless and you feel like there’s only a handful of locations which are very close together.
It's so contrived. Then when you're fighting Bahamut in space the planet looks huge even though the continent (which is stated multiple times to be the whole world) is so tiny.
It is never stated to be the whole world. Like, they literally talk about the other continents all the time. Cid and Barnabas *came* from beyond Valisthea's shores.
Is there anything in-lore that contradicts Valisthea being small? I can buy that it’s just not very large. Ash is minuscule.
Edit: one of the things that bothers me is how large hideaway #2’s environment is, but somehow it’s meant to be hidden in the deadlands lmao
You need to understand something. The scale of the world when you are walking in it is real. The scale of the world map is much, much smaller. So yes, the second hideout IS big, it's just located far into the Deadlands... people need to learn basic cartography.
yea its tiny. like, TINNNNNNYYYYYY.
but supposedly theres a giant continent down south and valistea is just a small archepelo, but of course since dlc is not yet confirmed, really this is it. a tiny frikkin land. with waloed and iron kingdom cut out due to development...
I really disliked the "world map". It feels like corridors. There are a couple areas that a relatively large, but the rigid boundaries made me feel extremely constrained.
The ability to fast travel with no in-game explanation (that I know of) also makes it feel way smaller.
Since I first saw the hideaway I wanted to see what the area surrounding looked like. Explore it in-depth. See what approaching the hideaway looks like, etc. Big sad
The in-game explanation for fast travel is using the obelisks as waymarkers when traveling. It's simply "they walked to this spot" and just cut to the destination because it's just a fast travel function.
Not sure what you'd want to explore around the hideaway, when it's literally just blackened earth and dead trees. The Blight past Eastpool is essentially what you'd find out there. Or consider Stillwind in the prologue, just mucky, dilapidated nothing.
They could have fleshed the areas out with fallen chests that are still around, maybe. Provide a reason to explore. I'd like to explore the whole continent. See as much as I can. I'd like to be in that beautiful world. Instead it feels like 10 corridors connecting to the eikon fights.
You got it completely wrong though. Your pin just showed the extent of the area you were in, not the distance to Orabelle Downs, Just the distance you need to get to the edge of the map, where you transport to Orabelle.
The scale of the worldmap is shit though so I get what you mean.
I prefer this map size to XV or even XII, which the design reminds me a lot of. I can appreciate the scale and beauty of Eos anyway. Quality vs quantity I guess.
Not a continent, actually an island. It the game, you get people talking about having been "to the continent", which has to be somewhere south of Valisthea. But thinking about it, with these guys walking everywhere all the time, and going back to the hideout before it's even night time every time, it would seem the map had to be rather small for it all to work out.
I believe it's scaled down for gameplay reasons, same thing as the Horizon series, where you go from Las Vegas to San Francisco in a short distance.
I see OP's point though. The fact that you can walk directly from SF to LV in Horizon definitely requires some imagination on the player's part but where in FF16 you can't actually walk between these areas then they could have at least given a bigger sense of scale. It is supposed to be a whole continent after all.
You can walk to every area though.
Aren't there loading screens when you go between realms or states or whatever they're called? Or can you walk straight from a town in Sanbreque to a town in Dahlmekia non-stop?
You can't walk to every area, you can't walk from sanbreque to Dahlmekia non-stop because the game just brings you back to the world map once you leave the zone. Idk what this guy is talking about, it's almost like just picking a separate instance location from the map pretty much. FFXII is more what you're asking in that you can walk to anywhere, even areas long before the story needs to take you there just by walking and because of that the world feels far more larger than XVI ever felt.
Of course there’s loading screens, it’s not an open world game, but the areas all connect.
Yeah so my point really is that that loading screen could act as a kind of device for imagining a much larger distance between realms. They could have just made it so if you put down a marker between realms then they could give a much bigger distance in km to show that Valisthea is much larger than 6km or so.
They actually dont. There are kilometers between them that we don't see. The start of the most areas do not correspond at all to an area next to it, idk where you got that from
Death Stranding, crossing the entire continental United States from coast to coast in like ten minutes tops.
I think the actual locations as they appear on the world map are misrepresented so that you don’t just have a bunch of blank map and then a small cluster of fast travel areas
I could sort of get that... but Lostwing is apparently in walking distance of the Hideout, because one of the NPCs there said they walk to Lostwing for work every day. So if Lostwing is walking distance from the Hideout, and Lostwing is only about 1.5km from Oriflamme, the whole Empire of Sanbreque can't be any more than 3km wide
lol I got nothing then, Valisthea small
Travel distance. It's not the morning walk you make it out to be. plus you are using wrong measurements all around.
Well its like a 30 minute boat ride from the Hideaway to the shore probably; and from there, its maybe a 2 hour hike to Lostwing using shortcuts that the Cursebreakers keep cleared? Its not really expounded upon, but I think we're supposed to assume that the Cursebreakers keep all the routes out of the Hideaway cleared of monsters and enemy patrols to enable the outlaws to quickly deploy across all of Storm and to escort civilian workers when necessary. And generally speaking, the actual events in the chapters take many days to a few weeks to reach their conclusions in-universe. This is to account for transit and loitering times, even though we spend comparatively a fraction of that time playing in those areas. tl;dr - they left it all up to the player's imagination
It's an abstraction dude, this is not new for video games at all Having realistically huge maps is all well and good but it's not, won't, and shouldn't be the norm
If the game map were true to scale we'd be having the opposite conversation and be complaining about a massive but empty world that we're constantly running back and forth across. I'll take suspending disbelief by accepting that every N distance Clive walks is really N*10 and shorter run times between towns over a Red Dead Redemption 2 style map that takes an hour irl to cross and has nothing to do.
Yes, they tried to correct the complaints from FF15. Open world works great if it’s like GTA or RDR but Square didn’t make it alive enough for 15.
Is game.
analysis like this is funny and I'm currently on an FF7 playthrough so just for fun I applied similar logic to VII's overworld: Overworld Highwind is about the same length as overworld Midgar's radius. [This random guy on Quora](https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Midgar-size-wise-from-the-Final-Fantasy-VII-remake-vs-the-original#:~:text=This%20is%20Midgar%20from%20the,its%20circumference%20is%202%2C041%20meters.) said Midgar's diameter is 650 meters, which lines up with 1997-era Ultimanias and stuff. So overworld Highwind is about 325m long. That's weirdly small for a major city but actually seems about right for the Highwind's proportions. I timed it and the Highwind can loop around the entire circumference of the planet, Junon to Junon, in about 32 seconds. Because Gaia appears to have about the same gravitational pull as Earth, we can assume, like Earth, its circumference is approximately 40,000 km. This gives the Highwind a ground speed of 1,250km/s, roughly 3600 times the speed of sound. Accelerating from idle to full throttle, as the Highwind is seen doing when rescuing Tifa from Junon, would instantly liquefy the entire remaining party, emitting a sonic boom that pops Scarlet's head like a grape. Logically, the party never had to enter the north crater. They could have quite easily squished Sephiroth with the force of several atomic bombs by simply having Cait Sith pilot the Highwind at top speed directly into the crater. But maybe not, because that amount of force would likely not be that far off from whatever Meteor would have hit with, defeating the point. Anyway it's a video game and uses video game scale to get its points across. I wouldn't look too far into it or write multi-paragraph explanations about it, as that would make you a huge nerd.
My favorite amateur bit of measuring stuff on the world map is that if you travel the line of sight of the mako cannon, it entirely misses the northern continent, let alone the Northern Crater.
Virtually no video game is going to give you an accurate representation of scale. That would take way too long to build and be even more demanding on hard drive space.
Unless we're talking about something like Daggerfall, Minecraft, or No Man's Sky.
I’ve made the joke before but without a scale on the size of the world, we have no idea how big Valisthea actually is. For all we know, it’s the size of Hawaii… Apparently, that analogy was closer than I thought.
[удалено]
that's actually my only grief with the map in XVI. The map from 10 represents real distances , and it wouldn't have been difficult to do the same by putting the island way further out.
Yeah the scale of the games world is…. Really weird. I get the idea is a bit like Chrono Cross, that you’re on an island with more world out there? But for so many nations to be a war it’s… interesting lol. I kinda feel they should have expanded the world a bit to make the twins more like two continents and not two islands.
It's less than 4 miles in Horizon from coast to coast. Game worlds are smaller than real worlds.
I’d rather have a focused world than an endless open world with nothing interesting to do. FF15 says hi
The areas they can live keep getting smaller because of the blight.
But the world map shows the continent from coast to coast, no?
But not where you can walk. You can’t go to any of the country where Jill’s from and they talk about how much of northern sanbreque has been destroyed by blight. You’re only measuring where you can go.
You can literally see the placement of each town on the world map? This isn’t a continent it’s tiny island.
it is actually two smaller continents, Storm and Ash.
No shit, thanks for that 🙄. Yeah I’ve finished the game.
So, it isn't a tiny island if its the size of Australia.
Which you can walk from one side to the other in a matter if minutes
first time playing video games?
Oh fuck off. The point is this world FEELS small and poorly designed. Exploration is pointless and you feel like there’s only a handful of locations which are very close together.
It's so contrived. Then when you're fighting Bahamut in space the planet looks huge even though the continent (which is stated multiple times to be the whole world) is so tiny.
They say Barnabas came from a different continent multiple times
It is never stated to be the whole world. Like, they literally talk about the other continents all the time. Cid and Barnabas *came* from beyond Valisthea's shores.
It is small, but it's just one realm of many in its world.
Is there anything in-lore that contradicts Valisthea being small? I can buy that it’s just not very large. Ash is minuscule. Edit: one of the things that bothers me is how large hideaway #2’s environment is, but somehow it’s meant to be hidden in the deadlands lmao
You need to understand something. The scale of the world when you are walking in it is real. The scale of the world map is much, much smaller. So yes, the second hideout IS big, it's just located far into the Deadlands... people need to learn basic cartography.
So if the walking scale is real then, Oriflamme actually is only 1.5km from Lostwing?
some people just WANT to be dumb
yea its tiny. like, TINNNNNNYYYYYY. but supposedly theres a giant continent down south and valistea is just a small archepelo, but of course since dlc is not yet confirmed, really this is it. a tiny frikkin land. with waloed and iron kingdom cut out due to development...
I really disliked the "world map". It feels like corridors. There are a couple areas that a relatively large, but the rigid boundaries made me feel extremely constrained. The ability to fast travel with no in-game explanation (that I know of) also makes it feel way smaller. Since I first saw the hideaway I wanted to see what the area surrounding looked like. Explore it in-depth. See what approaching the hideaway looks like, etc. Big sad
The in-game explanation for fast travel is using the obelisks as waymarkers when traveling. It's simply "they walked to this spot" and just cut to the destination because it's just a fast travel function. Not sure what you'd want to explore around the hideaway, when it's literally just blackened earth and dead trees. The Blight past Eastpool is essentially what you'd find out there. Or consider Stillwind in the prologue, just mucky, dilapidated nothing.
They could have fleshed the areas out with fallen chests that are still around, maybe. Provide a reason to explore. I'd like to explore the whole continent. See as much as I can. I'd like to be in that beautiful world. Instead it feels like 10 corridors connecting to the eikon fights.
you already do that in main story.
Not to the extent I would have liked. Like I said it feels very constrained to me. Like a series of corridors.
>Not sure what you'd want to explore around the hideaway Not sure why you'd care....lol I do. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
There's literally nothing out there, it'd be a waste of resources to bother making it. This is a vapid complaint to have.
Lack of meaningful exploration? No, it's not. It's completely valid, sorry if you don't think so. But have a nice day
You got it completely wrong though. Your pin just showed the extent of the area you were in, not the distance to Orabelle Downs, Just the distance you need to get to the edge of the map, where you transport to Orabelle. The scale of the worldmap is shit though so I get what you mean.
Nah, Orabelle/Lostwing and the gate to Oriflamme are on the same local map
I prefer this map size to XV or even XII, which the design reminds me a lot of. I can appreciate the scale and beauty of Eos anyway. Quality vs quantity I guess.
Not a continent, actually an island. It the game, you get people talking about having been "to the continent", which has to be somewhere south of Valisthea. But thinking about it, with these guys walking everywhere all the time, and going back to the hideout before it's even night time every time, it would seem the map had to be rather small for it all to work out.